A Day At The Senior Center

Last Thursday, I woke to discover enormous clothes-moths flapping about my bed-chamber. Horrified, I screamed for Standish, who valiantly tried to slay the winged brutes with a can of Flit. It was soon determined that other rooms were similarly besieged with moths, and that the entire mansion had to be evacuated for fumigation.

As I was wheeled to the court-yard, there was a danger that the exposure to the out-of-doors would cause me to contract pneumonia. So Doc McGillicuddy, my personal physician, recommended that I be taken to what he called the "Senior Day Center" down in the village. There, I could relax and enjoy the companionship of other elderly citizens until the mansion was freed of pests.

As my carriage pulled up to the center, I was aghast at what I saw. "Take me back immediately!" I ordered. "This is the County Home For The Destitute & Infirm! This is no place for a Zweibel!" But Doc explained that the Home was closed in 1947, and that ever since then, the building has served as a sort of recreational meeting-lodge for the elderly.

Wheeled inside, I was soon thrust into a group of people who were not elderly in the slightest. Looking to be in their 70s or 80s, they were young enough to be my grand-children! One of these whipper-snappers dared to speak to me. "Mr. Zweibel, sir!" he said, his face grotesquely contorted into a toothless smile. "As a lad, I used to shine your shoes! You had my out-of-work father jailed for vagrancy! We starved for months! Do you remember me?" I tartly replied that I did not.

Then, a woman in a nurse's outfit beckoned us into an adjoining room for what she called "exercise time." She switched on a gramophone, which played a horrendous, cacophonous nonsense involving a great deal of trumpets and trombones, which I later learned was known as "swinging" music. And, indeed, the youths began to clap their hands and rock feebly in their wheel-chairs. Preferring the menacing of enormous clothes-moths over the undulations of pagan savages, I loudly insisted that I be delivered from this coven of Satan immediately. The youth of to-day have definitely gone to pot!